DW Questions

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1.What are Semi-additive and factless facts?And in which scenario will you use s
uch kinds of fact tables?
There are three kind of facts,
Additive:-- That is the facts which can be aggregated or segregated on the chang
e of the dimension level and always remains meaningful: example: sales value
Now a days almost all data warehouses contain Additrivev facts
Semiadditive fact : That is the facts which can be aggregated or segregated on t
he change of the dimension level but becomes meaningless on aggregation or segre
gation
Ex : Gross profit percentage.
These can be represented while u use Customized OLAP
Nonadditive facts: That is the facts which Can Not be aggregated or segregated o
n the change of the dimension level and always remains meaningful:
Example: at the time of accident near C.N .Tower weather was HOT
Hot is non additive dimension.
(you can call me if you are serious to implement semiadditive and nonadditive fa
ct)
2.what are conformed dimensions?
conformed dimensions are the dimensions which can be used across multiple Data M
arts in combination with multiple facts tables accordingly
e.g : Date Dimension
3.Differences between star and snowflake schemas?
in star schemas all dimensions point to a centralized fact table
in snowflake dimensions pointing to fact tables itself are pointed by sub dimens
ion tables.
Question Bank on Datawarehousing:
General Questions:
1. What is a data-warehouse?
A datawarehouse is a repository(centralized as well as distributed) of Data ,abl
e to answer any adhoc,analytical,historical or complex queries.
It contains 3 types of data

2. What are Data Marts?

Data mart is a subset of a datawarehouse.
4. What is ER Diagram?
It represents entities and relationshiup between then in a domain
dwhetl tool kit by ralp kimbol

There are
Factless Facts:Facts without any measures.
Additive Facts:Fact data that can be additive/aggregative.
Non-Additive facts: Facts that are result of non-additon
Semi-Additive Facts: Only few colums data can be added.
Periodic Facts: That stores only one row per transaction that happend over a per
iod of time.
Accumulating Fact: stores row for entire lifetime of event.

1. Regular Fact - With numeric values

2.Factless Fact - Without numeric values

5. What is a Star Schema?

It has a centralized fact table ,reprensenting the facts on the intersection of
the dimensions directly pointing to the fact table.
6. What is Dimensional Modelling?
Breakup of standard Normilised data between ever changing fact(Numeric informal
data) and slowly changing or fixed non numeric data for fast and effective OLAP
7. What Snow Flake Schema?
in snowflake schema dimensions pointing to fact tables itself are pointed by sub
dimension tables.

8. What are the Different methods of loading Dimension tables?

Depends on Dimension type
For static dimensions one time or periodical loading can be done
For slolwy changing dimensions
1.Overwrite : but u will lost the historical aspect of dw

9. What are Aggregate tables?

These are the fact tables which do note represent the lowest granujlarity level
People do it when minut info is not needed and fast processing is required
10. What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP?

Online Transaction Processing : Lowest Granularity,continuous update,transaction

data,slow reporting
Made for fast insert,up;date,delete
OnLine Analytical Processing: Varying Granularity,Batch Update,Historical data ,
Fast reporting..
Made for fast reporting

11. What is ETL?

Extraction,Transformation,Loading
12. What are the vaious ETL tools in the Market?
DTS,Informatica,Decision Stream
13. What are the various Reporting tools in the Market?
Hyperion Essbase(earlier Brio),Analysis service,Cognos,Beacon .
14. What is Fact table?
Represents the numeric data of a data mart ,representing data on the intersectio
n of related dimensions..
15. What is a dimension table?
Non numeric data of the domain on the hierarchy of which aggregation or segregat
ion of fact is needed
16. What is a lookup table?
Represents metadata

17. What is a general purpose scheduling tool? Name some of them?

use in scheduling yaar,..say window scheduler/cognos scheu or upfront schedular
18. What are modeling tools available in the Market? Name some of them?
Analysis services,Architect(cognos)
19. What is real time data-warehousing?
it s a concept remains unimplemented, fast update of cube or DW

20. What is data mining?

Looking for a information which was previously unknown or hidden

21. What is Normalization? First Normal Form, Second Normal Form , Third Normal
Form?
22. What is ODS?
Operational Data Store
23. What type of Indexing mechanism do we need to use for a typical datawarehous
e?
24. Which columns go to the fact table and which columns go the dimension table?
(My user needs to see <data element> <data element> broken by <data element> <da
ta element>
All elements before broken = Fact Measures
All elements after broken = Dimension Elements

Changing numeric fields..fact table

Texual-dimension table
25. What is a level of Granularity of a fact table? What does this signify?
Grass root level Transaction data is
(Weekly level summarization there is no need to have Invoice Number in the fact
table anymore)
26. How are the Dimension tables designed?
De-Normalized , Wide, Short , Use Surrogate Keys, Contain Additional date fields
and flags.
27. What are slowly changing dimensions?
Which change over time,like employees department
28. What are non-additive facts?
Nonadditive facts: That is the facts which Can Not be aggregated or segregated o
n the change of the dimension level and always remains meaningful:
Example: at the time of accident near C.N .Tower weather was HOT

29. What are conformed dimensions?

conformed dimensions are the dimensions which can be used across multiple Data M
arts in combination with multiple facts tables accordingly
30. What is VLDB? (Data base is too large to back up in a time frame then it's a
VLDB)
Very Large Data Base
31. What is SCD1 , SCD2 , SCD3 ?
Kya hai,Data collection sattelites
ETL Questions:
1. What is a staging area? Do we need it? What is the purpose of a staging area?

It s the area where most of the ETL is done

2. What is a three tier data warehouse?
DW server,Olap Server ,olap clinet
3. What are the various methods of getting incremental records or delta records
from the source systems?
1.Extract source data from all operational records, regardless of whether any da
ta values have changed since the last
ETL load or not
2. Extract source data only from those operational records in which some data va
lues have changed since the last ETL load ( net change )

4. What are the various tools? - Name a few

informatica,decision stream,DTS
5. What is latest version of Power Center / Power Mart?
PC7
6. What is the difference between Power Center & Power Mart?
main diff is in support of source of data
7. What are the various transformation available?
Structured,semistructured,complex structured,unstructured
enough for now..